The soap opera journal of a poet who has set up household on the edge of Leona Canyon in Oakland, California where she creates meaning for herself from the vortex.

Friday, December 29, 2006

A Poem in Two Mood Swings

1.

I am the daughter who came afterthose who went to heaventhrough the opening of a chimney at Auschwitzor the lucky ones who sailed through a harborwaving the torch of their heartsat a statuenever mentioningthe two grandparents who remained

Sunday, November 12, 2006

When Bush Came to ShoveI was listening to election results on the couch the cat's tail is tick-tocking against the backdrop of my hair a day after we'd turned tables sent the bluecoats back to the White House,two days since I'd come down with a cold stretched out beneath a fleece throw

smell car exhaust fumes driverstuned to their own 6 o'clock evening news the kettle's on the stoveother life forms wait 200 billion years to get the picture.I'm in the kitchen.Tsk. Tsk. The past is not over yet.

Saturday, September 30, 2006

Reincarnated Lenny Bruce Speaks of The Jewish Problem

“… Israel calls in public speeches and schoolbooks the Arab citizens of Israel a demographic nightmare and the enemy from within. As for the Palestinian refugees living under occupation, they are defined in Israeli History schoolbooks as a 'problem to be solved’. Not long ago the Jews were a problem to be solved.”

--Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Lecturer in Language Education at Hebrew University in Jerusalem anda member of Palestinian and Israeli Bereaved Families for Peace.

Before there was a Jewish Problemthere was a Jewish Question.Maybe they were the same thing.

No one wanted the Jews to live in their country. People hated them.Why? Because they were different.

They wore yarmulkes,striped shawls, and smelled of fish.Fishy! Yech!

They spoke a different language,and lived in filthy ghettos.

After years of being squashed until their blood coated stonesalong every road leading somewhere,

but not to the pub except for the occasional schnopps on Shabbos,no, they didn't traipse to the beer garden

where the National Socialists, or Nazis as they later came to be called,decided to solve the problem.

The Jewish Problem, was not as so many had said, religious. It was racial, which gave the Nazisa legal basis for everything. This was so brilliant.

Jews were now excluded from six branches of industry. Properties were de-Jewdified.

Jews were prohibited from attending concerts, films, and theaters.Jews were prohibited from attending German schools.Jews were prohibited from bearing firearms.

You know what’s next.We’ve all heard about the six millionwho died in the ovens, and how the world

didn't want to know about anythinguntil it was too late, which is about whenthe Jewish Question became the Jewish Problem.

Where do you stick the Jewswho survived the Holocaust? You out there in the audience.Where the fuck d'you put them?

There was a search party.Everyone looked around.Uganda was too far from where the Jews wanted to be.

The Jews became a People for a Landfor a Land without a People.But that was a slogan, not the reality,

because it seems there were many peoplewho lived in Palestine, the Palestinians,

primitive people, said the army men, wild beasts with schmutzy teeth.

Fast forward to today when Israelis have a problemwith people who retain keys to housesthat are now occupied by families who light candles and invite the Shekinah of peace into their homes on Shabbos,

while during the week Israeli soldiers order Palestinian women to strip in front of their children for security reasons, and as jailers, torture and lock up young men without decent food or clean mattresses who run checkpoints that force old men to wait in line for hours without water.

Jewish life is filled with irony, which some of you out there call a Jewish sense of humor,but this is not funny.

And how can I, Lenny Bruce, who in my day talked a lot of unfunny stuff,not cry out as a Jew,how can I not say that justice and mercy belong to us all?

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Sh’mah Yisra’el

Hear O Israel, from a daughter who can only read the alliterative text of Hebrew with glasses that need a new prescriptionand a mouth that gets filled with saliva from a tongue that knows not how to delivertwo-dotted vowels—

Here O Israelfrom your daughterwho was born in the same yearyou were created, after World War II had foldedits charred arms around the only hope that was left—Israel, the land of milk and honey—

You were the voice of my parent’s generationwho planted trees along new boulevardsand carried ashes sewedinside the hem of their clothing to cry along the wadis of your limestone beds,hugging Exodus by Leon Uris.

You gave them a bright torchto carry every high holydayfor all their daysraising money and donating shoes—

a reason to drink teain a glass mug with a lump of sugarcoating their tongues with sweetnessas they stamped letters, made phone calls,argued with each other in the accentof wherever they’d come from.

Israel, my heart is heavy with the dreams of my parents, this second generation daughterwho wanted a lasting peace to fill the crevicesof your Wailing Wall with a light of its own creation.

Instead, only war and massacre,dairy farms and steel plants laid to rubble.Twisted iron stabbing the earth. And the sighs of the six millioneach time another official invokes their name.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Oakland is a Holy CityAt the orientation this evening, the first of several for 40 transition task forces with a total of approximately 800 members, who are meeting over the course of the next six weeks to give Mayor-elect Ron Dellums five recommendations. A process "to bring the brilliance of the people of Oakland together," according to Kitty Epstein, a representative from Dellums' staff. She said this is "historic and unprecendented" in the way this is happening. I'm on the task force for Transparency and Ethics in Government.

Friday, September 15, 2006

First Online Date, Background Check

So by no agenda do you mean you don’t care any number of California figs whether a said page turner wears poppy or propane blue nailpolish or doesn’t have hands altogether, but manages to turn turn turn through a suction device strapped to the top of his or her forehead, which leads to another question, do you have an agenda regarding the gender of the person who might join you for a latte on some semi-lit afternoon when the light filters in slanted Greek pillars across the city? Just wondering.

Or by no agenda do you imply that somebody somewhere did have an agenda and wrapped you hard around his or her bullet points until you started to bleed so badly you needed to tie a tourniquet along any number of pressure points to staunch what was rising up inside you like a revulsion washing away what some people might describe as a tender feeling? Just curious.

Or by no agenda do you mean you are open to the moment, to fill a container of whatever two people can become together and not have any preconceived notions regarding whether a container should come from Neiman Marcus, or Ross, or fed by streaming video? Because I think everyone has some kind of agenda even if it's a non-agenda except of course for moments when we're inside our own puzzle. A background is the hardest part.

Like times when I didn't know what or how to say something without an agenda, found hidden ones tucked inside other pant cuffs, pockets, velcro fasteners or zippers that were missing teeth and plain broken. Now my agenda has turned into a to-do list. I do, I do, said the Cowardly Lion. Keep going. Take a bus to North Beach. Walk home without an umbrella. Drive five hours to Disneyland just to give Mickey Mouse a hand.

Saturday, July 22, 2006

In the Shadow of the Middle EastA Spare the Air Daywhen public transit offered free rides on the housethe ferry fuller than it’d ever beencaps turned backward orange hair braidsdigital cameras snapping waves mixed with exhauston the hottest day of the yearso packed to the gillswe tipped backward and water-skied,but once we passed beneath the shadow of the bridge,there we wereon the other side of something we didn't know yet.

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Movie Review of X-Men: The Last StandA friend and I had tired of viewing Netflix DVDs on our 13-inch monitors and thought that over the Memorial Day Weekend, we'd treat ourselves to a visit to the big screen. The next question was what to see on the big screen. Oddly, it turned out that we were individuals who shunned fads. Both of us had neglected to read the Da Vinci Code and I myself had to admit to only knowing what "Sex in the City" was all about until several years after its debut on HBO when I was able to rent all the DVDs from Netflix and watch the smashing conclusion with Mikhail Baryshnikov, which is to say that we didn't want to see the Da Vinci Code.

I, instead, suggested that we see the third X-Men movie, having read positive reviews with intimations of a drug that had been found to cure the mutants of their weirdness. It offered the possibility of an intelligent movie that was fun at the same time: moral choices with character development and lots of computer animation.

I was game and so was my buddy. So despite the fact that I had confused the movie times with another theater, we found ourselves in front of the big screen, having missed all but one of the noisy trailers and quickly sitting down for a recap of the last two X-Men movies as Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) recruit young mutants from the sofa of their parents' living rooms. (This might be, I thought, a science fiction version of Harry Potter.)

Quick Disclosure: I am unfamiliar with the two other X-Men movies preceding this one, and score low on series trivia tests.

The movie was overall entertaining. Storm (Halle Berry) knows how to roll her eyes into her head until the pupils disappear better than anyone I know, if you go in for that sort of thing. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is hunky enough, but didn't have the real pathos of Lon Chaney's Wolf Man. (Is it wrong to ask for depth?) Mostly, as the movie ensued, I bemoaned all the lost opportunities to grapple with some tantilizing issues. For instance:

Why does Magneto flash his concentration camp tattooed numbers on his arm when some young mutant upstart insists on seeing his mark? (Forgive me if this is explained in previous episodes.) What I really want to know is how his experience has turned him into a sort of warped genius, in some ways not unlike parents who survived the Holocaust not ever discussing the pain of that experience with their offspring, but succeed in fucking them up nevertheless.

Why is the choice to take the drug and lose mutant individuality not a bigger moral question?

Only Rogue (Anna Paquin) grapples with the issue, if only for a few moments of screen time. Her special powers don't allow for physical contact with other human beings and she wants to get close, really close to the Iceman (Shawn Ashmore). But what about other more philosophical issues that could've been explored? Sure, a few of the characters proclaim, "There's nothing wrong with us," and in the end, regular hum-drum humanity gets to co-exist with the mutant population who now have a representative in the White House in the character of Hank "Beast" McCoy.

But what about examining parallels with the thousands of people in the United States who rely on mood-enhancing drugs to control their neurosis, which is not a judgment call, only a question. At what point does the quality of our lives become so terrible that we surrender ourselves to the cure or to the pill, or to an operation? The choice for HIV and AIDS patients is surely about life or death. But what about cases that are more subtle? What if someone doesn't want to be chosen by their special gift and grows tired of its demands?

Then I was confused by the internal "them" and "us" scenario -- the older more schooled X-Men who've benefitted by Professor Xavier's tutoring on how to use their gifts (don't let the power control you, something many of us learn in driving school), versus the younger tattooed and pierced hordes who team up with Magneto to kidnap and kill a bald boy who's hidden in a drug company's corporate headquarters on Alcatraz Island. His DNA is the source of this miracle drug.

As a group, Magneto's crew are a lot less sophisticated then Xavier's, who've had the benefits of a sort of ivy league education in the mansion. So what kind of comment is this upon public education as school becomes increasingly focused on passing tests and less upon critical thinking? Is our educational system producing unruly children who consider violence a viable solution?

A few other questions: Does it really take blowing up and moving the Golden Gate Bridge to Alcatraz to accomodate one of the punky mutants, the Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones), who's never learned how to swim? You'd think that an intelligent older guy like Magneto could come up with a more energy-saving solution.

Then what about the human population at large? How do they feel about the mutants merging back undetected into their ranks? Neighborhood populations always seem to be uneasy when child predators are paroled back into their communities.

And what about the nature of life once a grand mutant like Magneto, now stung with the drug's needle, is condemned to sit at a park bench, trying to stir the pieces of a chess board with his outstretched finger? How does it feel to be ordinary and to sit around remembering your old glory days?

I applauded for a moment where there's a scene with Patrick Stewart on the mansion's lawn, discussing the nature of violence. But it comes and goes too quickly.

I know. I'm too serious, and the film is based on a comic book. However, why not think graphic novel? I bemoan lost opportunities to explore provocative questions that the script raises. I refuse the notion that a sci-fi thriller can't do that. (What about 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick?)

Sunday, May 21, 2006

Houdini's Cousin in the Storage UnitShe was moving from a 10 by 15 into a 5 by 9, downsizing whatever she'd packed into plastic boxes with seals that popped when I lifted them like they were filled with effervescent secrets, household remains, until she'd decided to make the pile smaller so she gave stuff away -- not the piano, it was her husband's, he played -- to people who kept driving up in cars until the pile was small enough to move to the second floor where we stacked her stuff, me and PeeWee who had a stroke six months before and Freddy who bought PeeWee $15.00 worth of gas that morning so he could get there. She said how I was a magician for getting her shit into one space, and I said that's why alot of people called me Houdini and I wondered how he did those tricks, and she said she knew. Really, I said. Really, she said, because she was Houdini's cousin her father use to tell her it was all muscle control, he'd expand his chest when they chained him up, and after they dropped him into the river, he'd let out his breath and escape from the slack.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Un Dia Sin ImigrantesIt happened in Spanish.My father stood behind a kid wearing a T-shirtprinted with "Hecho in Mexico," and waved to mefrom across the street pointing to a digitalcamera like he knew how to use one.

I haven't seen him in years.He didn't drive either, said he didn't have timeto learn, worked six days a week supporting three girls. My mother was the one who drove.

She was there also, her arm chain-linked through hislike in the olden days when they were still alive,watching from the stand as everyone marched up 14th Avenue--grandparents, uncles, Moms, Dads,kids stuffed inside strollers and backpacks.

They waved harder now,began to chant "Si Se Puede" in a broken language,and the sound of their lettersstamped through the air.

Saturday, March 11, 2006

Dressed as a Wedding GuestRiding on a bus, dressed in a black suitwith the dust of his travelsmaking a path across his buttoned jacket,hair neatly trimmed into a gablethat points to a nose that speaks nothing to his mouth,but then, a nose is for smelling danger.

The wedding guest feels for a loose cord braided beneath his jacket,a loose cord that leads backto where he came from,a loose cord that is simple,unlike his life that has no words,so he waits

to deliver his giftto the assembled party riding with him on the bus,heads pressed to glass,when the man who is dressed as a wedding guest,pulls the cord,and marries them all to the same thing.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

I Have My Green Card Nowdon't tell me how a people string together thoughts on a beach of content keeps washing up shells and seaweed and dead things they stay for easy pickings in sentence structures the caw caw caw of slang banging into rocks

when I lived in Hungarian my mother tongue more of a step-mother who was married to someone I never knew there were hundreds of words for horses their smell, color, earth at a certain time of day or after a rain I knew where my tongue wrapped around shaped language with loam and light but now I've hit everything the ground running with English how many times in one year malls coupons ATM's express accounts can one person open because I've loaned my soul to the devil and I'm getting no interest

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

CellPhone Poem 17: Extra MinutesBusiness centers confronteach continental shelf,each wave of waterfrom my cubicleto your global positioning device,a world drawing in upon itselftighter under pressureas we turninto carbon diamonds carbondiamonds wearing headphonesspeaking with instant translatorsembedded on the edge of a bluetoothlook Mom no cavitiesno more countrieseverything a borderlandbeneath the freewaybordering on something elseon something else on something elsewhere time is a rerunin a new slot gameand we apple and orange through the bling bling of it all.

Thursday, January 05, 2006

Cannibal MemoriesWhere will I go to talk to you now that the house has closed and I no longer have the keys or can use the excuse of checking the mail to see if the honeysuckle has started to bloom or if daises are starting to grow after everything front and back yard was leveled?

Where will I go to speak your name now that there’s no place after you died in the front room of the house with glasses of soda, tissues, and a standing orchestra of pill bottles that did not cheer those itinerant trips between your room and the bathroom, your room and the kitchen?

How can I locate you in my cannibal memories and in the things I’ve carried to my next landing: candles, bells, necklaces, a file cabinet, me?